Last Friday, our generation lost one of its greatest innovators.
Internet activist Aaron Swartz hanged himself January 11, 2013. He was 26 years old. As a co-founder of Reddit, an architect of Creative Commons, and co-creator of RSS, he’s responsible for what the internet has become today.
A U.S. federal grand jury indicted him after he allegedly downloaded nearly five million documents from JSTOR through MIT’s network with the intent to distribute them. Swartz faced 35 years in prison and a $1 million dollar fine.
Following his death, the U.S. department of justice dropped all charges against Swartz. MIT will now investigate its own possible misconduct, and JSTOR announced it would make 4.5 million articles freely available—roughly the same number the U.S. government accused Swartz of stealing.
Swartz died because he was almost penniless and faced 35 years for downloading academic articles. What value, other than insight and education, did those articles have?
York students have access to the best of the sciences and the humanities, while denying marginalized communities, from Jane and Finch to the Global South, this wealth.
For Swartz, we “get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out.” We have a moral imperative, he said, to share this banquet with those who can’t afford the economic privilege of a university degree; and no matter how successful the Drop Fees campaign is, there will always be those who go hungry.
The day after Swartz killed himself, I received a threatening message from a Canadian literary estate, demanding I remove hyperlinks to pirated books by the deceased author on a blog. Disturbed by vague threats of escalation, I caved immediately and deleted the post.
In light of Swartz’s suicide, I regret not putting up a fight. I knew my classmates would benefit from these links. They should not be competing for library books that are often damaged, missing, or hoarded by grad school applicants. Academic information should be free. Classmates should be able to aid each others’ learning experience. Copyright be damned.
I talk a big game, but compared to Swartz, I am a coward. I couldn’t even distribute 12 books; I didn’t even get a letter from an actual lawyer. Facing the U.S. Department of Justice and a 30-year sentence, I can’t imagine the kind of stress Swartz was dealing with.
If York students want to honour Swartz’s memory, we can uses free and open source software, license content under Creative Commons, and contribute to an open source project.
We have lost a treasure of the internet generation, but thanks to Swartz’s contributions over his short life, we haven’t lost the internet.
By Ernest Reid, Executive Editor (Online)
